Pretty interesting article. It was a bit too long for me to give it my full attention, but the thesis seems to be that personalized learning is never going to work at scale, and that our current system is optimized to motivate the maximal number of students to learn.

At first, this seems bizarre, given that if you ask the average person, they hated school and felt unmotivated.

But when I gave it a second thought, I started to dimly understand what the author is saying: People may have felt unmotivated in school, but they still did it, and they learned the things necessary to pass, because that's what everyone else was doing too.

Usually when people say they weren't motivated in school, what they mean is that they weren't motivated enough to succeed to their maximum academic potential. Yet, the truth is they were still motivated enough to try and pass and learn enough to do so.

So it seems that what the author might be arguing is that our system is designed to maximize the number of students who can be motivated enough to learn something. While the current system might not be optimal for any one individual, it's the best way to create some motivation at scale.

I have to think more about this. One of the things I hate most about my job is dealing with lazy unmotivated students. Maybe I should just make peace with their presence, and comfort myself that despite their apparent lack of motivation, they were motivated enough to sit in the class and learn enough to pass.